Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike

Whitley Bay Book Group was fortunate enough to get review copies of this book from the publisher Faber – many thanks to Phoebe.

“Holding the Line” is an account of the 1983 Arizona miners’ strike, which although it has never been out of print in the US, has only recently been published in the UK. It started off as freelance journalism, focussing mainly on the women who were involved as miners in their own right as well as supporters of their male friends and relations.

I was keen to read this book mainly as I am a fan of Barbara Kingsolver’s fiction. “The Poisonwood Bible” is one of my favourite books, and “Demon Copperhead” motivated me to read the 800-page “David Copperfield” which inspired it. I was therefore interested to read this early work of non-fiction, written when the author was employed as a science writer and taking on freelance feature assignments.

Before reading this book, I hadn’t heard of the Arizona copper miners’ strike, so Kingsolver’s new introduction to the book was useful background, and provided interesting comments on how she felt the experience had shaped her as a writer.

And a British reader will inevitably make comparisons with the British Miners’ Strike of 1984, which is now over 40 years ago. The relationships among the Unions, the miners, the mining company, the authorities and the media were similar, and in both countries it was a key turning point in the history of the Trade Union movement. One of the main differences was that in the Arizona mines some of the women themselves worked as miners, although they had to fight for the opportunity and contend with prejudice and obstruction from some of their male co-workers. In contrast, in the UK nineteenth century legislation prohibited women and children from working underground.

The book takes the form of oral history, narrating the personal experiences of numerous women in the dispute, and I did lose track of the characters somewhat. Although the events took place more than forty years ago, it’s still shocking how the women were treated by the authorities who were in the pocket of the mine-owners the Phelps Dodge Corporation. Also shocking was the overt racism – many of the families are Hispanic American, and were subject to different pay scales and career prospects.

This is a fascinating book, both for its subject matter and as an example of early work by Barbara Kingsolver.

The twenty five page Introduction to this NF book is written in Kingsolver's classic, captivating style. From the compelling hook in the opening sentence stating 'This is the book I never planned to write' I was drawn into a series of increasingly shocking revelations about a period in American history that I had previously been oblivious to. The extent to which the authorities colluded with Phelps Dodge Corporation to break not only the copper miners strike but also the power of the Unions was clearly evidenced using first person testimonies. The unexpected positive impact events had on women as they fought to 'Hold the line' of the strike was well documented. I liked the literary device of naming each chapter after a phrase used in the last sentence of the preceding page. However, overall I felt that the book would benefit from being shorter and more focussed. It failed to fulfil the expectations raised by the powerful introduction so, at times, I struggled to stay engaged with the narrative.
I would like to thank Phoebe at Faber for advancing copies of this book to Whitley Bay Book Club for review purposes.

This is Barbara Kingsolver’s first book and it evolved originally from her employment as a young reporter in Arizona on a newspaper serving the, predominantly poor, rural mining communities. These communities essentially only had one industry, mining, and the limited prosperity they had was generated by that industry. Apparently for years the company and the unions had negotiated, sometimes slowly and with difficulty sometimes quite easily, the pay rises the miners should receive but then came Reagonomics and a new approach: the companies imposed the pay and the miners went on strike. Kingsolver, as a young reporter, travelled the communities interviewing the women who were at the forefront of the strike and those interviews became this book.

I found it particularly fascinating in terms of the 84/85 miner’s strike in Britain: same political ideology; same time frame; same one industry communities; same or similar attitudes in those communities - the distrust of outsiders, the patriotic element to industry support; the community cohesion. The big difference being the role of women; in Britain valuable background support, in Arizona literally ‘holding the line’ as pickets. Kingsolver is a brilliant writer and really makes the experiences of the woman seem real and personal. However I do think it shows that it was written as a series of newspaper articles rather than a continuous narrative and I think it would have benefited from editing as I found some narratives much more interesting than others. Overall however I really enjoyed it particularly, as above, because of the similarities and differences in the strikes and Kingsolver’s excellent writing.

Thanks to Phoebe at Faber for the complimentary copy for the Whitley Bay Book Group.

MadeleineR